Double-ended swash plate compressors capable of achieving large capacity and high efficiency with a simple structure are considered to be a highly viable option in applications such as automotive air-conditioning systems, and the specific structures proposed for double-ended swash plate compressors in the related art include that disclosed in Patent Publication No. 3266504 (see paragraphs 0020 to 0028, FIGS. 1, 2, 5 and 6).
This compressor includes a cylinder block having formed therein a swash plate chamber in which a swash plate is housed and a plurality of cylinders, pistons that move reciprocally inside the cylinders, a front-side cylinder head fixed to one end of the cylinder block via a valve plate and a rear-side cylinder head fixed to another end of the cylinder block via a valve plate. At each cylinder head, an intake chamber in which the working fluid to be guided into the cylinders is stored and an outlet chamber in which the working fluid having been compressed at compression spaces is stored are formed, and the compressor further includes an intake passage communicating between an intake port formed at a cylinder head and the swash plate chamber, a relay passage that communicates between the swash plate chamber and the intake chambers, an outlet passage formed at the cylinder block, which communicates with the front-side outlet chamber and the rear-side outlet chamber, an outlet passage formed at the cylinder block, which communicates with an outlet port formed at one of the cylinder heads and a guide passage that communicates between the outlet passages at a middle area thereof.
In the structure described above, the working fluid having flowed in through the intake port is guided to the swash plate chamber via the intake passage and then is guided into the intake chambers at the cylinder head via the relay passage. After it is compressed at the compression spaces, the working fluid is delivered into the outlet chambers, and then is made to flow out through the outlet port via the outlet passages and the guide passage.
However, the external component at which the intake port and the outlet port are disposed may need to be mounted at the cylinder block instead of a cylinder head, depending upon the compressor installation location, the piping layout or the like. If the design of the gas passages inside the compressor is to be completely modified each time the position of the ports needs to be altered, the design of the individual components constituting the gas passages, too, will have to be reviewed, which means that these components cannot be provided as universal components and that the advantages of mass production are not gained.
Accordingly, an intake gas passage and an outlet gas passage may be formed in advance at the housing and the external component having disposed thereat the intake port and the outlet port alone may be redesigned in correspondence to the positions at which the ports need to be located. However, this solution may lead to further problems in that the positions of the ports and the positions of the gas passages can be greatly misaligned depending upon the layout of the piping connected to the compressor, necessitating the gas passages formed within the cylinder heads to adopt complicated shapes and that the passages extending from the ports to the gas passages can become unnecessarily long, to result in lowered compressor performance, an increase in the number of machining steps and a more complex casting process.
A primary object of the present invention, which has been completed by addressing the problems of the related art discussed above, is to provide a swash plate compressor adopting a specific structure for the gas passages formed in the compressor to solve the problems described above and afford a higher level of freedom with regard to the port positions so as to achieve better versatility is supporting various compressor models assuming different port positions.